


No Harm in Habitual Grievances

by ghostnebula (gghostnebula)



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Abuse, Angst, Attempted Murder, Buried Alive, Character Death, Chronic Illness, Clairvoyance, Eddie Kaspbrak Whump, First Kiss, Hospitals, Hurt/Comfort, Illnesses, Insanity, M/M, Mentioned Maturin | The Turtle, Murder, Panic Attacks, Poisoning, Richie Tozier Loves Eddie Kaspbrak, Sonia Kaspbrak Being Terrible, The Turtle CAN Help Us (IT), Whump, sometimes, technically
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-29
Updated: 2020-10-30
Packaged: 2021-03-09 02:48:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 12,980
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27257446
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gghostnebula/pseuds/ghostnebula
Summary: “What the fuck?” Eddie rasps again, and his breathing picks up, that bitter fear setting into his muscles and making his whole body go taut, constricting his lungs. He pushes harder against the top. Something tells him he needs to calm down, conserve oxygen, but that can’t be right, that can’t be right, that shouldn’t be necessary.Underneath the cloying pine scent is the smell ofdirt.-For HallowRen's Spooktacular IT Project 2020My prompt: Graveyard
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier
Comments: 19
Kudos: 81
Collections: HallowRen's Spooktacular IT Project





	1. No harm in habitual grievances

**Author's Note:**

> So, this fic comes with TWO endings, choose-your-own-adventure style (sort of). 
> 
> Ending 1 (chapter 2) is the very sad one.
> 
> Ending 2 (chapter 3) is the slightly less sad one.
> 
> You can read either, or both. Your choice. 
> 
> Read the tags for warnings. Plus:  
> -mentions of vomiting; no actual vomiting

* * *

Sonia presses another cold cloth to Eddie’s forehead. The image of her above him warps when he tries to focus on it, and he’s not sure if he’s trembling or there’s a fucking earthquake in Derry. 

He does  _ not _ fucking feel okay. For once, he wishes she would take him to a hospital.

He wishes she would just…  _ behave _ normally again.

Normally for  _ her. _ He wants her to fuss and freak out and drag him into the emergency room wailing and sobbing and causing a scene. 

But  _ she can do this, _ she insists. She can take care of him. She’s a good mom. She’s better for him than anyone else, right?

_ Right? _

He wishes, most of all, he’d told the other Losers as soon as he suspected something was wrong with her. This is more than just a phase. This is beyond, even, some kind of downward spiral. 

He thinks this is insanity.

She’s muttering to herself again. That she can do this. She can take care of him. She’s a good mom. 

Only  _ she _ can make him better. 

But she  _ can’t. _

He isn’t getting better. His fever is spiking. His head is spinning. He hasn’t been able to keep anything down for the last few days and dehydration is beginning to take its toll on him.

“I… I wanna,” he croaks, praying his voice reaches her, “I wanna go to the-the-the hospital.” His teeth are chattering. Nausea burns in his throat. 

He  _ never _ wants to go to the hospital. That’s the only place in the world worse than this fucking house. But he’d  _ kill _ to go there now.

He refuses to let himself dwell on it, but the thought occurs to him again that he might be dying.

“Oh, Eddie.” Her hand smooths over his cheek, making his skin prickle and the nausea somehow  _ worse. _ “You don’t need that. There’s a prescription waiting for you at the pharmacy. It’ll make you all better, okay? I’ll go get your medicine for you, Eddie-bear.”

He wants her to leave because she’s smothering him and  _ hurting _ him and  _ overwhelming _ him, and he wants her to  _ stay _ because he doesn’t want to die alone.

_ Don’t think like that. _

His eyes burn with a threat of tears that he has barely enough water in his system to produce. 

He wants his friends. If he can’t go to a hospital, he at least wants his friends here with him while he withers away in his bed. 

They’re supposed to be having a sleepover tonight --  _ was _ it tonight? He thinks he’s lost track of the days by now. He’s been sick like this for at least a week or two, sick enough to miss school, sick enough his mother wouldn't even allow his friends to drop his homework off for him. Not that he could have done it anyway. He can barely lift his head, let alone write essays. 

He’d give  _ anything _ to be over at Bill’s house right now, setting up for a Losers’ Club sleepover, inflating air mattresses and preparing snacks and picking out movies to watch. He was  _ supposed _ to be there with them, because he got so sick he couldn’t move, and he’ll bet none of them even realize just how bad it is.

His mom is just overreacting, as usual, they must think. She’s been intercepting everyone’s phone calls, and she’s been a constant presence in his room the past few days, so no one could even sneak in to check on him. They’ll think it’s all her, that it’s all in her head, just like always, and that in a few more days he’ll be back at school with them and good as new.

But he  _ won’t be. _ He knows he won’t be. When he tries to lift his arm to push her away, make her stop touching his face, his limbs just won’t cooperate. They’re heavy and weak, and he lacks the energy required to move them. 

“I’ll be back for you,” she tells him, and she’s crying -- why is she crying? “My poor baby.” She presses a damp kiss to his forehead, holding it for far too long. Her tears drip onto his face. “I’m so sorry. Mommy loves you so much, do you know that? I’ll always love you so much.”

Eddie thinks he should nod. That’s what she’ll want, anyway. His acknowledgement. He should nod. He might. He might not. It’s hard to tell. He blinks, his eyelids heavy, and when he’s able to pry them open again she’s gone and the shadows in the room have shifted. 

He wants to call an ambulance for himself. She’s gone, and there’s nothing stopping him while she’s gone. He wants a real doctor to figure out what’s wrong with him. Pneumonia, he thinks, or else something worse. He doesn’t dare give too much thought to the C-word, not when he knows what it did to his dad, not when he knows there are genetic factors involved. Something is wrong, something  _ big, _ but he’s hoping with all his might it isn’t something so sinister. 

He wants to call an ambulance. He wants it to take him to the hospital and he wants the doctors and nurses to make him stop feeling this way, like all his energy is seeping out of him and there’s nothing he can do to stop it. 

He wants to call Bill’s house. He wants the Losers to pass the phone around to each other so he can listen to each of their voices, and tell them all how important they are to him. He wants them to come here and take him away, once and for all, and help make him  _ better. _

He wants that more than anything, but when he tries to move, he’s barely able to lift his head from the pillow. 

But he wants his  _ friends. _ Desperately. More than anything. 

_ Please, _ he urges himself, leaning his weight onto one shoulder in an attempt to, at the very least, roll himself out of the bed.  _ Please, you only have to get to the phone. You only have to make it that far. _

But he doesn’t. He doesn’t, and when he opens his eyes again, it’s with great difficulty, and only because he’s being jostled by something. The warm surface of the mattress disappears from beneath him. A chill creeps up his spine as cold air rushes against him from all sides, but he doesn’t even have the energy to shiver. He’s hanging limp in someone’s arms, and he can barely open his eyes enough to see the blurred outline of his mother’s face above him, looking somewhere ahead. 

She’s drawn and pale. More so than usual, as she’s been worrying herself into frenzies the last several days with his deteriorating health and her inability to provide adequate care. Her lips are moving rapidly as she struggles down the stairs, burdened by his weight even though he’s so thin lately. “It’s such a tragedy,” she’s saying, in a frantic whisper. Tears are shining on her cheeks.  _ ‘What’s a tragedy?’ _ Eddie wants to ask, but he can’t find it in himself to speak at all, if he could move his lips and his tongue to make noise in the first place. “So young. So unexpected. I did everything I could.”

Eddie feels his consciousness slipping away again. He wants his friends. His heart rate picks up, or at least he thinks it does, if the sudden roaring in his ears means anything. That’s all he’ll ever ask for again, is just for his friends to come take him away from here. 

Or even just to see them one more time. Just one more time. 

Even over the sound of his own heart, he hears his mother whisper to herself, “My Eddie has always been so strong. He’s always coped with his ailments beautifully. Right up until the end, he always handled these things so wonderfully. I’ll always be so proud of him.”

He thinks to ask her for water. Maybe ask for her to put him back in his bed, where he hadn’t exactly been comfortable, but his limbs and head hadn’t been clipping the walls as she carried him away somewhere. Maybe, and it’s a silly thought to have, but maybe he’d ask one last time to go to the hospital and this time she’d listen and he could just feel okay again.

Instead, he falls asleep.

It’s dark when he wakes up. So dark he can’t even begin to make out where he is. He’s lying on some uncomfortable wooden surface and it’s all he can smell -- pine, maybe. Like the Christmas trees he’s never allowed to have at home because they’re fire hazards. The Toziers set one up every year. Always a real tree, from that lot in Newport. They usually bring Eddie with them to pick it out, if he can get away from his mother long enough to join them for the day. Mr. Tozier will buy them all hot chocolate and cookies while they wander around and make a big deal out of finding the right tree, just so they have an excuse to spend as much time there as possible. They’ll take a picture together against one of the big Christmas backdrops and they’ll always include Eddie, even though he isn’t part of their family.

And on good years -- when his mother isn’t already calling the Toziers’ house and demanding he be sent home by the time they haul the tree through the door -- he’ll stay for dinner and help decorate the tree.

He doesn’t want to die, because he wants to keep going back to that, every year. When Hanukkah and Christmas fall close together on the calendar, he wants to join Richie’s family for Chrismukkah and let Richie talk him into sleeping over during their break from school, as many days in a row as he dares.

He sucks in a breath that makes his lungs ache and tries to lean his weight onto his elbows so he can sit up. Fortunately, sleep seems to have (somewhat) refreshed him, and he’s able to lift his shoulder from whatever he’s lying on. His head still pounds and his limbs still shake, but he doesn’t feel like he might die any second.

He pushes with his elbows and his forehead collides with something solid, knocking him back down with a dull  _ thunk. _

“The fuck?” he grumbles to himself, his throat painfully dry. He lifts his hands and finds a smooth expanse of wood, just like the one he’s lying on, stretching above him. He finds an edge, but it only dips down into more wood. Enclosing him on all sides.

Fear settles like ice on the back of his neck and races down his spine. He plants both hands against the top of… of  _ whatever _ he’s inside of, and pushes with all his strength, which isn’t much at all. It won’t move.

“What the fuck?” he rasps again, and his breathing picks up, that bitter fear setting into his muscles and making his whole body go taut, constricting his lungs. He pushes harder against the top. Something tells him he needs to calm down, conserve oxygen, but that can’t be right, that can’t be right, that shouldn’t be necessary.

Underneath the cloying pine scent is the smell of  _ dirt. _

Panic slams into him full force. It’s accompanied by a surge of adrenaline that makes him nearly forget about how sick and weak and awful he feels. He uses his feet, too, to try to push the lid off the damn thing, but it  _ won’t fucking budge. _

_ What the fuck did she do? _

_ There’s no way.  _

_ There’s no fucking way. _

Eddie beats his feet and fists weakly against the wood and opens his mouth to scream, even while a frantic part of his mind urges him not to.

  
  


*

  
  


Richie jerks awake, sucking in a gasping breath as he scrambles to sit upright. His heart and mind are both racing, but already he can’t remember what he was dreaming about. If the sweat soaking his shirt and the tears coating his face are any indication, it’s probably for the best he’s forgotten. 

Still, he can’t shake this nagging feeling that whatever he’s forgetting is something  _ important. _

He rubs his hands over his eyes, trying to get his breathing back under control and calm his frantic heart, before fumbling about in search of his glasses. There’s stirring all around him -- he can feel it more than he can see it, in the darkness of the Denbroughs’ living room at God-knows-what-time in the morning. He must have woken the other Losers with his fuss.

“Sorry,” he’s already telling them as he prises his glasses out from between his pillow and the edge of the couch. “I think I just had a weird dream.”

“So did I,” Ben says, voice taut, and Richie can’t see him even  _ with _ his glasses on but he can hear the fear.

“Me, too,” says Beverly.

A lamp clicks on at one end of the couch, making everyone momentarily recoil, and there’s Bill’s face, ashen, as frightened as Richie felt just moments ago, staring them all down. “Something’s wrong.”

“Yeah, we all ate too much sugar before bed and now we’re learning that it’s true that the stuff makes you have nightmares,” Richie tries to joke, but it comes out too hollow to be convincing. 

_ There’s something important he’s forgetting. _

_ Maybe something from his dream. _

_ Maybe Bill remembers. _

__ But why would Bill remember something from  _ his _ dream?

“Something’s  _ wrong,” _ Bill says again, and this time his voice breaks and Richie can see the tears shining in his eyes. “Can’t you tell?”

And Richie thinks,  _ sort of, _ but even if he  _ couldn’t, _ he knows by now to trust Big Bill’s instincts. They all look at each other with the same trepidation before turning back to Bill.

“What is it, though?” Mike asks, finally, and Bill shakes his head.

“I don’t-- I don’t know. I don’t know. But we have to go.”

_ “Go?” _ says Stan incredulously, looking towards the windows where a small sliver of the black night peeks through the hanging curtains. “Go  _ where?” _

“I don’t _know!”_ Bill cries, before remembering himself -- and the fact that his parents are asleep upstairs -- and bringing his voice back down. “I’ll know when we get there.”

They could argue with that easily enough, but Richie still feels like something is suffocating him, like his heart is shrivelling up in his chest, his hands trembling despite his best efforts to calm himself. Something  _ is _ wrong. Something bad has happened. 

He tries not to think of Eddie. 

It doesn’t work.

Eddie is at home with some fake illness or another his mom made up as an excuse to keep him there. She never likes when he goes to sleepovers.

She never likes when he goes  _ anywhere. _

Eddie is home, and Richie has to hope he’s safe. For the sake of his  _ sanity, _ he has to hope he’s safe. 

Whatever is wrong, it needs to be with  _ someone else. _

With  _ something _ else, ideally. 

Hell, he’ll take the clown coming back two decades early over something bad happening to Eddie.

They try to keep as quiet as possible as they change into day clothes, Bill urging them along all the while, trying to get them to move  _ faster, _ because there’s somewhere they need to be, and they need to be there  _ now. _ Richie stumbles into a pair of jeans and throws a sweater over the sweaty  _ Guns N Roses _ tee he’s using as pyjamas and doesn’t bother lacing his converse on the way out the door. 

Bill ushers them all out into the damp, cool air of a spring night, still foggy with sleep, still confused by everything going on, and he has to stop in the middle of the driveway for a long while to get his bearings.

Then he turns towards the garage. 

“Bill, what the hell?” Richie demands while Bill lifts the garage door just enough to duck under it. There’s faint clattering from inside, a light flicking on, and then, just as Mike and Bev are making as if to follow him in, a shovel and a spade slide through the gap and onto the pavement of the driveway. Then a snow shovel. And a second, slightly more rusted, spade.

Bill’s breathing heavily as he turns the light off and slides the door shut again.

“Shovels,” he says, and nothing more.

“No offense, but I think you’ve officially lost it,” Bev says, staring at him blankly as he tries to gather the shovels into his arms.

“We need  _ shovels,” _ Bill insists, bordering on frenzy. “We need _ more.” _

“Bill, what do we need shovels for?” Mike asks, trying to be gentle, but Bill still goes tense with frustration.

“I don’t  _ know.” _

“Okay.” Stan steps between them and puts his hands up. “Bill, take a deep breath. You can’t think clearly when you’re worked up. Who else has some shovels we can use?”

Richie’s house is just a couple blocks away. They take Mike’s truck. They’re lucky enough to find three more shovels buried in all the crap in the shed, even though one has a broken handle. It’s good enough to satisfy Bill, who sets off the second the shed door is closed like a bloodhound. He throws himself into the passenger seat of the truck before anyone else has even gotten  _ near _ it, already telling Mike to go up Witcham Street, into town. The various shovels are tossed in the back with the rest of them, sliding around by their feet as Bill tells Mike over and over to just drive faster,  _ please, _ and Mike asks over and over where he wants him to  _ go. _

There’s harrowed silence between the rest of them, staring at each other with the same hellish apprehension.

_ “Are we planning to dig a fucking well?” _ Richie wants to ask, but his heart is in his throat and he doesn’t know  _ why _ and he’s terrified to find out.

Bill stops them in front of Grace Baptist Church. He’s out the door before the truck has come to a complete stop, reaching into the bed by Stan’s feet to grab the nearest shovel, and he urges them all along, insisting in a voice laced too heavily with fear that they all get their asses in gear, but for  _ what? _

He stands for a moment with a rusted old spade clutched in his shaking hands, trying to catch his breath, before darting around the side of the building. They all follow without question, even though Richie himself has  _ thousands. _

Mostly, though, he has a horrible, gnawing fear that pricks at his insides and makes the faint urge to vomit stir up in his belly.

He tries not to think of Eddie.

Stan ruins it. “You think...” he starts lowly, breathlessly, as he jogs alongside Richie, following Bill to wherever the fuck he’s taking them. Oz or some shit. “You think Eddie’s alright?”

“Well,” Richie says, more to reassure himself than Stan, if he’s being honest, “if Eddie snuck out of his house and came all the way out  _ here _ instead of going to Bill’s, I’d say he’s gone as looneytunes as his mom, so this probably doesn’t have anything to do with him.”

Richie wants to believe that, but he’s also catastrophizing a little bit, and worrying about Eddie is quickly taking over his entire mind, because what if  _ what if  _ **_what if._ **

_ What could Eddie possibly be doing out here, though? _ he has to ask himself again. 

Why here, and not with them?

There’s an iron fence surrounding the graveyard behind the church. The gate is unlocked, and Bill shoves it open to rush inside before stopping again. The other Losers skid to a stop around him. He looks around, confusion evident in the downward draw of his eyebrows. 

“Okay, Bill, what the fuck?” Richie pants, leaning against the fence, breathing harshly. “This is a fucking graveyard. It’s the middle of the night. This is like,  _ asking _ to get murdered, or haunted, or possessed, or something.”

“Shh!” Bill says, waving a hand dismissively at him. “I don’t…” He turns this way and that, pauses to clutch at his head, screwing his eyes shut. A frustrated growl tears up out of him. Then a gasp. “Oh,” he says, and his gaze settles on Richie, and it’s nothing short of _devastated._ _“No.”_ Fat tears start rolling down his cheeks just like that. _“No!”_ he cries again, and then he’s running, careless of the grave markers he steps on as he goes, and trailing behind him is a litany of _“Oh God oh fuck oh Jesus Christ”_ and _“No no no no”_ and _“Please please please.”_

When he finally stops again, everyone else tripping over themselves to keep up with him, it’s beside a freshly filled grave, and he doesn’t hesitate to sink the shovel he’s holding into the dirt and start digging.

“Jesus Christ, Bill, what the fuck?” Richie snaps, trying to shove at his shoulders to make him stop  _ digging up someone’s fucking grave, _ and is that what all this is about? Grave-robbing? Stealing a body? Who the fuck’s body could even  _ warrant--? _

Bill turns blue blue  _ blue _ eyes on him, unnaturally bright in the clouded dullness of the night,  _ unnervingly _ aware. Tears still drip off his chin, which trembles as he tries to speak, fighting against Richie and still attempting to shovel away the barely-settled soil from the unmarked grave. “Eh-Eh-Eh-Eh,” he tries, and gives up resisting Richie to grab his bicep and squeeze. Richie’s almost afraid to look him in the eye. “Eh-Eh _ -Eh-Ed--” _

“Oh my God,” says Ben, and he rushes up behind Bill and starts tossing dirt aside fast as his arms can move. “It’s Eddie.”

_ “What?” _ Richie and Bev demand at the same time, looking at the rectangle of churned earth and not really registering anything for a few long seconds. Richie doesn’t, at least. This is a  _ graveyard. _ That’s someone’s  _ grave. _ Someone  _ died  _ and was buried there. 

Eddie is alive. Eddie’s at home with his psycho mom who’s pretending he’s sick to keep him from going to school, or a sleepover, or from just hanging out with any of them. Or he’s for-real sick and she’s blowing it out of proportion as usual (he didn’t really look so hot when Richie saw him last, which was about two weeks ago now, so he should be better soon anyway, even if he really  _ is _ sick). 

Eddie is  _ not _ six feet under the ground in the fucking Grace Baptist Church graveyard. He can’t compute that for a bit. 

But why else would they be here?

_ Is Eddie dead? _

He doesn’t let himself acknowledge that question. That’s a stupid question. Stupid as they come. Eddie’s right as rain. 

Eddie’s at  _ home. _

Eddie’s  _ fine. _

Richie’s heart beats in his throat, suffocating him. His hands shake.

Eddie’s at home.

Eddie’s fine.

Eddie’s  _ fine. _

Eddie’s  _ fine, right? _

He digs.

_ Everyone _ digs, even though they don’t quite all fit. Bev and Stan end up pushing all the stuff away from the edges to make it easier for everyone else to get the dirt out of the hole, and they press deeper and deeper into the ground, and how deep is six feet anyway? How far do they really have to go?

But Richie doesn’t notice much of what  _ they’re _ doing, because he’s busy wondering. 

How much air is in a coffin underground?

_ Is  _ Eddie in a coffin?

How’d he get there? Someone had to have put him there.

_ (Is he dead?) _

_ Why’d _ someone put him there?

How long would the air last?

How long has he been down there?

_ Is  _ it Eddie? Is it anyone at all? Is it an illusion -- a glamour? Is this still a dream?

_ (Is Eddie dead?) _

_ (Was he dead before he was buried?) _

Richie’s  _ shaking. _ His shoulders, his arms, his legs. Not just from the strain of shovelling dirt for… for however long he’s been here (he lost track, too caught up in his own head). He’s  _ afraid. _ His ribs shake, too, around his heart and his lungs, and breathing won’t come easy. It won’t come at  _ all. _ He’s hyperventilating, but he pushes through and he digs. Someone’s hand is on his shoulder. He shoves it away. He digs.

Why the fuck is dirt so  _ heavy? _

Tears are dripping off his face but he doesn’t pause to wipe them away, doesn’t stop to catch his breath, and in the shaking there’s the faint whisper of  _ please please please please. _

_ (Is Eddie dead? How did he die? Who buried him like this?) _

Eddie’s  _ fine _ because he  _ has _ to be fine because Richie doesn’t know what to  _ do _ with the alternative. 

The brittle smell of the dirt burns in his nostrils and itches in his throat. He’s standing in a hole up to his chest now.  _ How much farther to six feet? _ he has to wonder. 

That isn’t where Eddie belongs.

A hand on the collar of his sweater yanks him backwards and then two more under his armpits are lifting him out of the hole, and in his surprise, he drops the shovel. “The  _ fuck?” _ he growls, trying to twist out of the grip, but a hand clamps down around his jaw and he finds himself staring into Beverly’s sparking blue eyes. “Richie, you need to  _ breathe.” _

“I-I-I-” Richie starts feebly, breath hitching, opportunely, on a sob. 

“You’re no help to anyone like this.” But Richie sees it, too, in her: that visceral fear, all those questions, all the what-ifs he’s afraid to let himself think about. There’s the dampness of tears on her face that he can see through the dirt smudged on his glasses. 

“At this point, you’re mostly in the way,” says Stan’s voice on his other side. “Four of you don’t fit in there. Just let them do their thing.”

Bev lets go and Richie turns to him. Sees the heartbreak on Stan’s face even as he tells Richie, “He’ll be okay,” but he has no way of knowing that.

“What… what if he’s not?” Richie stammers, filthy fingers twisting into the grass and the clumps of dirt littering the edge of the grave. Another pitiful sob explodes in his chest.

“He’ll be okay. He has to be,” Stan says firmly. His hand shakes on Richie’s shoulder, fear and uncertainty. Fear and uncertainty. Richie wants to puke.

“Eddie’s tough as nails, Richie. You know that.” Bev’s fingers close around his forearm and squeeze. “We don’t know what happened. We  _ don’t. _ But he’s  _ gotta _ be okay because he’s the fiercest little shit this town has ever seen. Right?”

Richie thinks he should laugh, thinks maybe she’s trying to make him feel better, but he’s hurting deeper than he’s ever hurt before and it rests heavy like lead in his throat and chest -- it feels like he’ll never be able to laugh again. He doesn’t know what to do with this because it’s never been a problem before. He’s never had to  _ seriously _ consider the question of what he would do without Eddie.

Eddie’s supposed to outlive him by a million-and-one years and make the universe his bitch. That’s what Richie always tells him, at least, and Eddie always gets all huffy and tells him that  _ no, _ he isn’t planning on outliving  _ any _ of them by that long, because what the fuck’s he gonna do when they’re gone?

_ “Finally get some peace and quiet, Eds,” _ Richie would tell him, and Eddie would pretend to consider it before deciding one year  _ with _ his friends was better than a million without them, no contest, and Richie would agree but he’d never really give it more thought than as a joke, something to tease Eddie with. He never meant it seriously. They’re never supposed to be missing a piece of the puzzle. It’s seven and it will always be seven and it will never, ever be less, because how can they possibly survive with less?

“Is he dead?” he asks tearfully, turning from one of them to the other as if they could possibly have the answer. The thought makes him feel like  _ he’s _ dying. 

“No,” Bev says, stern.  _ “No, _ because he isn’t allowed.” But her voice wobbles, and her eyes go too bright as she tries to blink away tears. 

Dirt piles up on either side of them for some time, and Richie doesn’t try to distract himself from  _ wondering. _ Might as well brace for impact, he figures. Expect the worst. Eddie’s already buried, and what else could that mean?

* * *

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Once again, in the style of those hellish choose-your-own-adventure style Goosebumps books, you get to pick how you want to proceed from here.
> 
> Chapter 2: Very sad (character death)
> 
> Chapter 3: Less sad (no character death)


	2. Wail my dear time's waste

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Richie sinks to his knees again on the hard wooden bottom of the coffin, hands already reaching for Eddie, who remains limp and unmoving.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Read this to make yourself sad :)
> 
> This is the "character death" chapter (no warning on the fic, because you can actually skip this if you want, but it is in the tags). If you don't like character death, move on to chapter 3. 
> 
> If you choose to read this, know that I am sorry, but not THAT sorry, because I did choose to write and publish it.

* * *

There’s a shout from below, then Mike and Ben are scrambling out of the grave and Richie’s jumping back in, landing beside Bill just as he’s ducking down to shove the dirt aside with both hands. There’s something smooth and solid beneath it, lighter in colour than the earth. Richie drops to his knees to help, and thinks he has to at least  _ try. _

“Eddie?” he calls as he pushes all the dirt to one side and tries to find a seam, a lid he can lift.  _ “Eddie, _ please tell me you’re there,  _ Jesus, _ oh my God.”

There’s nothing -- no sound, no response, no muffled voice calling back to them. Richie feels Bill’s eyes on him, but Richie dives right back in to clearing the space around the coffin, because he  _ needs _ Eddie to be okay and he  _ needs _ to get him out of there as fast as possible. Bill follows suit, tossing several handfuls of dirt up out of the hole until finally,  _ finally _ Richie can find a break in the edge of the cheap pine box and jam his fingers under it. 

Apprehension bleeds into his gut because his worries are too great and too many, and anything from  _ what if this isn’t Eddie _ to  _ what if something is seriously wrong _ boils up in his head in that moment.

He braces himself, heaves, and the lid comes off in a cascade of dirt. Bill’s already climbing out of the hole, reaching down to clutch it in one hand and take it with him as he goes, to make space now that the only available surface for him to stand on is gone.

Richie, on the other hand, sinks to his knees again, this time on the hard wooden bottom of the coffin, hands already reaching for Eddie, who remains limp and unmoving even when Richie’s filthy hands close over his face, turning his head to try to make him  _ look _ at him. But Eddie’s eyes are closed, and he doesn’t react when Richie taps his cheek a few times with the tips of his fingers. His skin is still warm, but his lips are  _ blue, _ and he’s  _ pale, _ too pale for Eddie Spaghetti. 

Richie feels like the ground has dropped out from under him and he’s falling, falling, that nasty, crawling sensation in his gut from the G-force creeping through his whole body. “Eddie?” he says, small and tentative, slipping one hand under Eddie’s shoulders and the other behind his head to help him sit up. Maybe if he sits up he’ll be able to open his eyes, and his blue lips will part and he’ll thank Richie for coming to save him and Richie-- Richie will feel more like a knight in shining armour and less like his soul is withering and dying. “Eds?” He shakes Eddie, but Eddie only flops over like a ragdoll in his arms. 

He’s vaguely aware that the other Losers are asking about Eddie from somewhere above his head,  _ is he breathing _ and  _ is he alright _ and  _ is that him for sure? _

“Eddie Spaghetti?” he tries, too quiet, too stupidly hopeful, like Eddie can actually answer him. Like Eddie can actually  _ hear _ him. “Eddie, c’mon, you gotta wake up, I  _ need _ you to wake up.” His voice catches and then he’s crying, chest heaving painfully, feeling like his skin is cracking apart and he’s going to crumble to dust right here, like this. He scrambles for the nearest source of help, of authority; for the nearest person he trusts to take charge and fix things.  _ “Bill!” _ he cries, strained, and the questioning chatter above him dies abruptly. A pair of legs land in the grave, in the darkness somewhere in front of him, and through the blur of tears Richie can see that it isn’t Bill, but Stan, who’s come to help him. 

“Let me see,” he insists, reaching out to pry Eddie from Richie’s arms and lie him down in the pine coffin again. He does what Richie’s too afraid (too far in denial) to do, checking Eddie’s pulse and turning an ear to Eddie’s mouth, listening for the sound of breathing while he watches and waits for his chest to rise and fall. Tension creeps through his body as several long seconds pass and nothing changes.

Stan, being eternally more level-headed than most of them (Richie especially) doesn’t hesitate to plant his hands on Eddie’s chest and begin compressions when it becomes clear that his heart has stopped and he isn’t breathing at all. Richie feels it like the universe is imploding -- the crushing gravity of reality. He can’t  _ do this _ without Eddie. It’s a  _ seven-piece puzzle _ and they  _ need _ all seven and what is he supposed to do if Eddie isn’t here with him? 

All that weight from the collapsing universe compresses to a single point in his chest and tries to suffocate him.

“Mike!” Stan is calling, leaning the full weight of his body onto his arms as he tries to force Eddie’s heart back into action. “Help me get him out of here!”

They’re  _ taking Eddie away, _ the two of them together, treating his body like he’s something fragile (he isn’t; he’d resent that), and Richie needs to go with them. He can’t let Eddie just disappear. He  _ needs _ to follow them. 

His limbs don’t feel like they’re attached to his body anymore. He watches Eddie vanish from sight and hears the commotion of the other Losers trying to figure out how to  _ help, _ like there’s anything more to be done than whatever Stan’s desperate efforts might accomplish.

Bill and Bev materialize before him. He’s hyperventilating again, he realizes, as Bev tries to shush him despite the rapid rasp of her own breathing and the tears clinging to her eyelashes. They get their arms under Richie’s and force him to his feet, and then Mike and Ben are dragging him up out of the grave, and he thinks, deliriously, that maybe he’d rather just stay down here and die, too.

Maybe it would hurt less if he could just die and him and Eddie could just stay down here, together, forever.

Richie lets them take him away, anyway, and he falls to his knees the moment he’s out of that wretched fucking hole in the ground, where he wouldn’t mind just staying. Numbness spreads out from that aching point in his chest, soothing that feeling of cracking open, skin splitting, shaking apart while he watches Eddie lie too still and Stan fuss over him.

Bev’s arms wrap around his shoulders, and shortly after, so do Ben’s. Bill’s fingers twist into his sweater and hold fast, trembling, and Richie can’t tear his eyes away from the sight of Stan breathing air into Eddie’s unresponsive lungs, but he knows Bill’s face is a picture of grief and heartbreak, because Richie can feel it, too.

He thinks he must surpass every other stage of grief, because something like quiet acceptance settles over his numb body as tears stream down Stan’s cheeks and nothing changes. Nothing changes. 

There’s no relief of a desperate gasp from Eddie as his body suddenly remembers how to live again, and there’s no break in the frantic motion of Stan’s hands as he tries to  _ make him remember, _ and Richie wouldn’t mind, he thinks, just dropping dead here and now.  _ Just put him back. _

_ Just put him back and shovel all the dirt back in place and this time I’ll go with him. I’ll go with him. I’ll keep him company, just like always. _

Mike’s gone. Mike’s gone off somewhere. Beverly shakes and cries against him while Ben tries to comfort her, and Bill clings like Richie is somehow an anchor in this situation (like Richie isn’t crumbling to dust right now and just accepting it as it happens). 

Richie has half a mind to shake them off, to crawl forward and swat Stan’s hands away and take Eddie back into his arms so he doesn’t have to forget what it feels like, because isn’t he? Isn’t he going to forget? 

Eleven years he’s known Eddie, and eleven years they’ve been in near-constant physical contact, and how long until it all dissipates in the wake of his absence?

Mike comes back, breathless and panicked, face falling when he sees that Stan is still performing CPR and  _ nothing has changed. _

An ambulance comes shortly after. Richie isn’t allowed inside. 

Richie’s going to forget what it feels like to hold him. This is it, he knows, as he watches the flashing lights tumble away down the street, towards the hospital, and the six of them are stuck in stunned silence in the aftermath. He’s not going to get another chance, and if they could only have moved faster, figured it out earlier, done  _ better, _ they could have fixed this.

Richie’s not going to ever tell Eddie the things he’s wanted to tell him since they were barely preteens, and he doesn’t have anyone but himself to blame because he’s a coward and a freak, and because he couldn’t remember his stupid fucking dream fast enough, and because he couldn’t run or dig or  _ act _ fast enough. Eddie deserved to know. Richie should have told him. He isn’t naive enough to think anything would have come of it, but Eddie deserved to  _ know _ how loved he was. 

But he’s just a fucking pussy and he could never muster up the courage for it, and now look at him.

The other Losers have to force him to stand, force him to walk to the truck, force him into the passenger seat beside Mike. The space between them aches with emptiness. Eddie should be with him, here, and he knows he should be -- but he isn’t. He isn’t and it has to be Richie’s fault, and when they get to the hospital they’ll only tell him what he already knows, so he just lets the truth sink in now, while the world flashes by in a blur outside the windows.

He’s sitting under the harsh fluorescent lights and someone is pressing a warm drink into his dirty, shaking hands, and all Richie can think is that he knows exactly how this happened and exactly who (besides himself) is to blame. 

Sonia Kaspbrak has always been a little bit  _ off her fucking rocker, _ after all, and she’s just crazy enough to do something like  _ bury her son alive _ and  _ let him suffocate and die in a coffin underground. _

She  _ killed _ him. Richie’s tears drip onto his hand, and into the paper cup full of steaming coffee he hasn’t touched. Richie could kill  _ her, _ for doing this to Eddie. For doing this to  _ all of them. _ She killed Eddie, and Richie wasn’t  _ good enough _ to protect him, even when the same strange supernatural forces that worked to protect them five years ago tried to intervene. Bill dreamed about turtles, he said, and he dreamed about a sense of urgency with no origin (until there  _ was _ one, while he was standing in the graveyard, and it was  _ Eddie),  _ and that’s all he can remember, but it’s more than any of them.

And  _ still, _ they weren’t good enough to save him, and now they’re sitting in the waiting room of the hospital while Eddie’s in the fucking  _ morgue,  _ and they can’t see him, and they don’t know what comes next.

Do they just go home? Richie can’t bear the idea. 

He never wants to go anywhere again when he has to carry this void with him. He doesn’t dare violate his living space with this rotting, aching feeling he can’t shake. 

If he leaves now, that’ll be it. He’ll just be leaving Eddie behind, somewhere in the basement of the hospital, and… what? Moving on?

_ Yeah, right. _

It might be better to just sit here until his body gives out.

Eventually someone pries the cold cup of coffee from his hands and someone else hauls him to his feet, and he’s made to shuffle away towards the automatic doors that lead back outside, where the sun is rising over Derry. He doesn’t want go, because he can’t stand to just leave Eddie like this, but he can’t find the strength to protest, so he ends up back in the passenger seat of the truck, hands detached from a body buckling his seat belt for him (Eddie would reprimand him if he didn’t wear it, just like Eddie turns into a little ball of anxiety every time he has to ride in the bed of the truck). Then he’s back at Bill’s house, in the chaos of the living room and all their abandoned blankets and sleeping bags, and someone (Stan -- that’s Stan) is helping him lie down, saying something maybe encouraging, maybe reassuring, and Richie’s asleep before his head even hits the pillow. 

  
  
  


“It’s such a tragedy,” Sonia is saying, a wad of tissues clutched in her hand even though her eyes are dry and dull, face almost stoic. “He was so  _ sick.  _ I did everything I could to help him. I thought I could help him.”

“Ms. Kaspbrak, Edward wasn’t sick, he was poisoned.”

“He was so  _ sick. _ I did everything I could.” She dabs at her dry eyes and smiles at the judge, who’s looking increasingly flabbergasted by this whole affair, and Richie wants to  _ scream. _ “My Eddie has always been so strong. He’s always coped with his ailments beautifully. Right up until the end, he always handled these things so wonderfully.”

It’s the same thing she keeps saying. Every day, over and over again, no matter who tries to get a proper response out of her, no matter how many times the objective truths are shoved in her face. _Eddie was sick._ _I tried to help him. He’s always been so strong. But he died anyway, so I buried him._

Eddie was  _ poisoned. _ Sonia  _ poisoned  _ him. She buried him before he was even dead, and he suffocated six feet underground, alone and afraid, probably thinking no one would bother coming to save him.

_ Someone did, though. _ His friends came to save him, but they just… weren’t enough. 

They  _ tried. _

Richie  _ tried. _

They give up. Sonia’s declared insane, and they cart her off to Juniper Hill, and give up on trying to get her convicted of  _ anything _ besides being fucking nuts, and it doesn’t  _ fix anything. _

Someone else was buried in that grave they defiled, after the Derry Police were done “investigating,” if it could even be called that -- they took out the shitty pine coffin and disposed of it, and had the groundskeepers fix up the hole, and the funeral for some stranger proceeded as normal, and Richie doesn’t know what to do with that. It’s all  _ wrong _ and Richie wants to go back in time and undo it all. 

There’s the place Eddie died, and the place he was buried, and Richie can’t figure out which one matters more: the one with his name or the one without. The one with his body or the one with his soul.

Richie doesn’t want to believe in ghosts, but how can he truly not believe in those things when he believed perfectly well in things like  _ It? _ When he believed perfectly well in werewolves and lepers and statues coming to life and evil clowns that eat children and drowned boys coming back to haunt people? 

Sometimes he sits in the Grace Baptist Church graveyard for hours and hours by a headstone marked with a stranger’s name and tries to talk to Eddie like he’s still there, trapped six feet under the earth with only another strange spirit for company, or otherwise just a strange decomposing corpse, and then he tries not to think about  _ Eddie’s _ decomposing corpse only a few rows over.

Sometimes he sits for hours by a headstone marked with “ _ Edward F. Kaspbrak, November 3, 1976 - May 8, 1994”  _ and he lets himself drown in the numbness that’s followed him for  _ months, _ and he wonders whether he’ll see him again once he’s dead, too.

Sometimes the other Losers come with him, but Richie prefers to make his confessions in privacy. Over and over, telling Eddie everything he was too stupid to tell him while he was alive, and wishing that could just bring him back. Telling Eddie how much he loves and misses him while he faces an engraving of “ _ Dewey Conroy,” _ whoever the fuck that is, or while he kneels on the newly-grown grass over where Eddie’s body  _ ended up. _

When the time inevitably comes around that the Losers have to pack up their lives and leave for college, one person short of their original plan, Richie has pictures of two different graves tucked into his belongings alongside years and years worth of photos of just  _ Eddie, _ existing and breathing with the rest of them. Sunburnt and smiling at the quarry, playing with Richie’s Game Boy in the hammock, dressed up in a hideous Christmas sweater in that tree lot out in Newport, smiling for a photo with Richie’s family against a gaudy Christmasland backdrop.

He doesn’t want to forget where Eddie is -- where he can go back to him -- any more than he wants to forget the way he looked, or the sound of his laughter, or how it felt to hold him.

A few years and a few failed degrees later, he finds himself forgetting, anyway.

* * *


	3. All losses are restored (and sorrows end)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Richie sinks to his knees again on the hard wooden bottom of the coffin, hands already reaching for Eddie as Eddie struggles to sit up.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The not-so-sad ending! Enjoy!

* * *

There’s a shout from below, then Mike and Ben are scrambling out of the grave and Richie’s jumping back in, landing beside Bill just as he’s ducking down to shove the dirt aside with both hands. There’s something smooth and solid beneath it, lighter in colour than the earth. Richie drops to his knees to help, and thinks he has to at least _try._

“Eddie?” he calls as he pushes all the dirt to one side and tries to find a seam, a lid he can lift. _“Eddie,_ please tell me you’re there, _Jesus,_ oh my God.”

There’s a faint _thump_ beneath them. Richie freezes. Bill freezes. They look to each other with something like shock and amazement and begin clearing the space around the coffin with renewed vigour. Bill tosses several handfuls of dirt up out of the hole until finally, _finally_ Richie can find a break in the edge of the cheap pine box and jam his fingers under it. 

Apprehension bleeds into his gut because his worries are too great and too many, and anything from _what if this isn’t Eddie_ to _what if something is seriously wrong_ boils up in his head in that moment.

He braces himself, heaves, and the lid comes off in a cascade of dirt. Bill’s already climbing out of the hole, reaching down to clutch it in one hand and take it with him as he goes, to make space now that the only available surface for him to stand on is gone.

Richie, on the other hand, sinks to his knees again, this time on the hard wooden bottom of the coffin, hands already reaching for Eddie as Eddie struggles to sit up, because he’s _here_ and he’s _tangible_ and _alive._

And he looks like _hell._

All around his eyes is shining with a thick coat of gummy tears, like his body couldn’t quite muster up the energy to produce any proper ones even though he needed so badly to cry. His lips are chapped and cracked and his skin is _pale,_ too pale for Eddie Spaghetti. He trembles as he tries to lift himself out of the coffin, his wild-eyed gaze fixed somewhere _through_ Richie. His breath comes ragged and wheezing. Richie’s hands close around his face and smear dirt all over his cheeks but he can’t bring himself to care and he hopes Eddie doesn’t either because he’s _alive._ He’s _breathing_ \-- not _well,_ but he’s _breathing._ He's alive, in Richie's hands, and Richie doesn't feel like the bottom is going to drop out of the world anymore, just holding him and looking into his wide eyes.

He lets himself have his moment of awe, then he shakes himself out of it, slipping one arm around his shoulders and the other to the back of his head as he helps him sit up the rest of the way. “Eds. Oh my God, Eds. _Eddie.”_ Richie lets his tears soak into Eddie’s hair while he just holds him like that for a while, and eventually he feels one of Eddie’s arms curl over his back. “You’re okay,” he says to both of them, almost disbelieving. “You’re _fine.”_

Something is still wrong, and he’s known since the moment he touched Eddie, but he gets a little more crying out of his system before he can acknowledge it, waiting until that too-heavy lump sitting in his chest has begun to dissolve. “Eddie, you’re _burning up,”_ he says, and even now he can feel the heat through his clothes. “Holy fuck.”

Eddie doesn’t say anything, just keeps right on wheezing, making the occasional hiccupping sound like he’s _trying_ to sob but not quite getting there. Never before has he felt this _fragile_ in Richie’s arms. Like a ragdoll. He’s not doing much to support his own weight, but that weight seems to amount to virtually nothing, anyway.

He’s vaguely aware that the other Losers are asking about Eddie from somewhere above his head, _is he breathing_ and _is he alright_ and _is that him for sure?_

Down here, it’s hard to be sure of anything except that it _is_ him and he looks like _death,_ and that his breath rasps too harshly in his throat and lungs, and that Richie doesn’t care so much about how he got there anymore, too busy caring about Eddie being _safe._

And the heat, the fever-heat, rolling off of him. The feeble way his fingers try to cling to the filthy fabric of Richie’s sweater.

Richie isn’t _sure_ that what he’s supposed to be feeling right now is relief.

Mike is lowering himself back into the grave in front of him, gaze fixed on the back of Eddie’s head. The rapid-but-shallow rise and fall of his little chest is probably visible enough in the minimal light down here, but even if it wasn’t, surely Mike can _hear_ Eddie breathing.

“He’s okay,” Mike says, soft brown eyes turning to Richie as he speaks, as if he isn’t just announcing it to the other Losers, but reassuring Richie of the fact as well. Richie _feels_ his face twist up as more tears drip into Eddie’s hair. He’s probably holding him too tight but he’s so afraid to let go.

“I-I-I think he’s sick,” he manages to get out as Mike reaches for them. “Like, _sick_ sick. He doesn’t sound good, Mikey. He’s got a really bad fever.”

“C’mon. Let’s get him out of here.” When Richie tries to let go of Eddie and pass him off to Mike, Eddie clings to him with a strength he didn’t possess a few moments ago, sharp little nails digging into Richie’s sides as he hooks his other arm around Richie’s waist.

“I… I wanna go… to th-th-the _hospital,”_ he rasps, so quiet Richie would miss it if they weren’t pressed so closely together. 

And that’s _new,_ coming from Eddie, but it isn’t unwarranted. That’s exactly where Richie was hoping to take him, anyway.

“Okay.” Richie combs dirty, shaking fingers through Eddie’s hair, throwing Mike a helpless look. “We’ll take you to the hospital, okay? But we gotta get out of here first. Can Mike help you get out?”

Eddie doesn’t seem to hear him. Or, he doesn’t seem able to answer, if he did. He just breathes too-quick against Richie’s collarbone and burns his skin with the heat from his fever, and Richie’s anxiety is born anew when he thinks that, maybe, Eddie’s still dying anyway. Maybe he wasn’t meant to suffocate in a box underground so much as he was meant to boil his brain with fever or choke to death on his own weak lungs. What a cruel twist of fate that would be, even for them.

Richie has to _pry_ Eddie off of him, even though he’s just as reluctant to let go, and somehow he looks _worse_ from farther away. Richie can see he’s lost weight since they last saw each other, can see the full-body tremors that tear through him at random, can see the way he recoils from the foreign touch when Mike tries to take hold of him.

“Wanna go to the _hospital,”_ he insists again, and frankly he sounds like shit. Richie wonders if any Loser thought to grab a water bottle in their frantic departure from Bill’s house. 

“We’re taking you there,” Richie assures him again as he helps Mike get Eddie’s limbs situated around him and lends him his knee so Mike can boost himself out of the grave.

He scrambles out after them, unwilling to let Eddie out of his sight, still in disbelief that they even found him _here,_ of all places, in a fucking _grave._

He has his suspicions about how _that_ happened (Sonia Kaspbrak has always been a little bit off her fucking rocker, if he’s being honest), but he dismisses them, because the _important_ thing right now is to get Eddie to a fucking doctor before his brain starts melting out of his ears or something.

Mike doesn’t even bother trying to make him walk. The other Losers crowd around them excitedly as Mike crawls out of the hole, Richie close behind him, all of them trying to ask Eddie questions, but he doesn’t even lift his head from Mike’s shoulder as Mike walks grimly on. “We’re going to the hospital,” he tells them, already headed back towards the church, and the truck parked out front. There’s a mad dash to gather the shovels and then everyone follows Richie and Mike, who is still carrying Eddie like a fucking toddler. The only indication that Eddie’s alive comes from the stuttering movement of his shoulders as he struggles for air.

“What’s wrong?” Stan’s asking as he comes up on Richie’s left. 

“He’s sick,” Richie says thickly, refusing to tear his gaze from Eddie. _“Bad_ sick. He’s got a bad fever and he’s breathing funny.” He blinks away the threat of more tears. Eddie’s survived worse. He _has._ He’s survived worse, and he’ll survive _this --_ Richie swears to God he _better_ survive this. “I… I think he’s dehydrated, too, or something. I dunno. He really doesn’t look good.”

Stan’s quiet for a few long moments after that. “How do you think he got there?” he asks, slowly, as they’re approaching the truck. But he already knows the answer. They all do. There’s only one person in the world who’s batshit crazy enough to bury her own son alive like some kind of wacko ritual only _she_ understands. 

She could have _killed_ him.

He very well may still die.

Richie could fucking kill _her,_ for doing something like this to Eddie. He can’t even imagine how terrifying it must have been to be trapped down there.

Instead of answering Stan’s question, Richie growls, “If she ever fucking goes _near_ him again, I’m gonna--” But it loses its edge when his voice wavers and breaks, and he has to scrub tears from his eyes.

Mike tries to deposit Eddie on the bench seat in the truck, but it goes about as well as Richie expected, and he has to physically remove Eddie’s arms from around Mike’s neck to get Eddie situated in the seat. Richie climbs right in beside him so Eddie is propped up between him and Mike, at least, but “propped up” barely applies. Eddie just kind of flops over onto Richie’s shoulder and goes limp again.

“I don’t feel good,” he announces quietly, as Richie’s arm curls around his shoulders to draw him in closer. The clatter of the other Losers climbing into the truck bed dies down behind him and Mike starts the engine. One of Eddie’s hands comes up, slowly, to press against his face, and then a harsh, dry sob tears out of him. Richie feels it reverberate in his own chest where they’re pressed together. Then another, and another. No tears come. “Please take me to the hospital,” Eddie says _again,_ still stumbling over the words, and Richie’s heart cracks clean in half. 

He draws Eddie halfway into his lap, and it’s a testament to how unwell Eddie is that he doesn’t complain about seat belts or unsafe practices or auto accident rates or _anything._ He just lets Richie hold him and sobs against his shoulder, dry, barking sounds that _hurt_ to listen to. 

“Eds, it’s alright, we’re going, I _promise,”_ he assures, rubbing a hand up and down Eddie’s back slowly in what he hopes is a soothing gesture, the fever-heat burning his palm. “We’re going _right now._ You’ll be alright.”

He makes eye contact with Mike over the top of Eddie’s head and sees the very same uncertainty he’s feeling reflected back at him. The truck speeds up a little. Richie stops moving his hand to just let it rest on Eddie’s ribcage, feeling him breathe.

Eddie’s _fine._ He has to be.

*

_“No, I’m cutting you off. No more caffeine until you--”_

_“--just call the cops? What’s the harm? They’re useless at best, but--”_

_“--may be a little bit stressed, Richie, so I think you should take a deep breath and--”_

_“I know that no one is ever going to replace Georgie, I_ know _that, but I just…”_

Eddie’s never been run over by a tractor trailer, but he’s pretty sure this is what it would feel like. There’s a horrible weight bearing down on his chest with every breath being forced into his lungs, and every single joint in his body feels stiff and swollen. His _skin_ hurts. The light overhead burns his eyes when he tries to open them.

There’s pressure in and all around his throat. He tries to cough to clear it away but he _can’t,_ he can’t and it _hurts_ it _hurts it hurts it--_

_“What happened to, ‘I’m a lover, not a fighter.’ huh?”_ Eddie knows that voice. That’s Bev.

_“Maybe I was wrong.”_

_“Maybe you’re sleep-deprived and stressed out of your mind. Why don’t you go get some fresh air, Richie? I’ll even let you have coffee again if you just take a moment for yourself. Okay?”_

Something touches his forearm. Eddie _feels_ it. It’s the only thing he can feel right now that isn’t _awful._ Someone’s hand on him, fingers curling around his wrist--

Richie looks like _hell._

Eddie can assume he isn’t much better off, since he’s positive he’s currently lying in a hospital bed, but he can’t see himself.

He _can_ see Richie, and Richie looks like absolute garbage.

He’s staring _intently_ at the wall opposite him, eyes ringed with purple bruising from what Eddie has to assume is lack of sleep. His leg bounces erratically. His fingers fiddle with a dented paper coffee cup, spinning it around, over and over and over, pinching and twisting as he goes.

“You’re going to give yourself an ulcer,” Eddie _tries_ to say, but what comes out instead is a strained croaking noise he doesn’t think a human being should be able to produce.

Richie’s head whips around towards him, his bitten lips parting around a gasp. Eddie tries to force what he hopes is a smile, something to reassure him, but it definitely comes out as more of a grimace. He’s probably not even _capable_ of smiling right now. The whole “being run over by a tractor trailer” thing still stands, even though Eddie’s reasonably sure some time has passed since then. 

Richie just gapes at him. 

And gapes.

Eddie worries for a second he might have gone into shock.

Richie lunges for the call button beside his bed.

He’s forced to sit up. It is potentially the least pleasant thing he’s ever experienced, and that’s counting being buried alive (actually, thinking about that sends a jolt of pure panic through his system and makes his heart monitor go haywire, so maybe… _second_ least pleasant). He’s forced to drink water, which hurts more than it should, which is when the dull-eyed nurse informs him that he was intubated for a short time. He’s forced to go through all kinds of little tests to see how he’s faring after being out for (apparently) over a fucking _week -- what the fuck?_

_“Heart, kidney, and liver damage,”_ he’s told, _“from continuous and excessive use of ipecac syrup.”_ He doesn’t use ipecac syrup, he argues. He hasn’t ingested poison, so he has no need for drugs that induce vomiting. But, no, he’s clearly been taking large doses of ipecac recently. 

Something called serum sickness, and, _“Do you know that you have a penicillin allergy?”_ (He does.) _“So why have you been taking it?”_ (He hasn’t.)

This doctor is looking at him like he’s crazy. Like Eddie tried to poison himself. Like he’s considering having Eddie committed. Eddie’s head spins.

“I think I’d know if I was taking those things!” he insists again, voice rough from the intubation. “My mom would’ve told me--”

But she wouldn’t have, would she? Does she tell him what _any_ of his medications are, or what they’re for? He just happily tosses back cocktails of pills when she tells him to, because it’s easier than fighting with her. She always wins, anyway. 

And can he really put _poisoning_ past her? She buried him. He _knows_ she did. He knows it was her, and that she’s finally gone off the fucking deep end, and probably decided he was dead (or good as) and didn’t want anyone to realize she’d… what? Failed as a mother? Killed her son with her insistence on taking care of him? Killed him with… with _ipecac syrup and penicillin,_ knowing full well he has life-threatening allergic reactions to the latter?

What the fuck did she _do?_

Eddie bursts into tears and the balding doctor retreats from his room without bothering to offer any comfort.

Richie, though, is on him in an instant, his weight compressing one side of the mattress as he sits down to pull Eddie into a hug. 

“She tried to kill me,” he says, as if Richie hasn’t already figured that out.

There’s a tense stretch of silence while Eddie tries to calm himself down and Richie rubs soothing circles on his back, breath warm against the top of Eddie’s head. “I know,” Richie says eventually. Then, “I’m sorry. I wish I could’ve stopped her. I wish I could’ve been there for you before she--”

The door to Eddie’s room slams open and he looks up in time to see a whole gaggle of Losers descending on him, and then everything is a blur of hands and smiling faces while Richie refuses to relinquish him to someone else, and his crying turns into laughter at some point.

Bill plants his ass on the other side of Eddie’s bed, tells Richie to back off, then wraps his arms around both of them anyway.

“You’re moving in with Bill,” Bev is telling him from where she’s hovering over Richie’s shoulder. “Just until we leave for college. Just a couple months. There’s no way in hell you’re going back to your house.”

She must notice the way his fingers grip Richie’s shirt a little harder, or else she reads his mind, because she smirks and leans in closer. “Well, the thing is, Bill’s parents kind of need to adopt you, after, you know... after you talk to the cops and, uh, get your mom in some real deep shit. Because you won’t be eighteen until November, so someone’s gotta take you in.” She shoots a sly look at the back of Richie’s head. “And Richie doesn’t want _his_ parents to adopt you, because--”

“You zip those lips, Miss Marsh,” Richie demands, and Beverly looks positively _gleeful_ as her jaw snaps shut and she backs off. “You zip them and you keep them zipped.”

“Aye, aye, captain,” she says, giving a mock salute that Richie can’t see before winking at Eddie.

“I don’t wanna…” Eddie starts, trying to draw back from where Richie and Bill are both holding him, licking his too-dry lips. He’s a little busy turning over the details of the Denbroughs adopting him in his mind. “I don’t… Bill, I’m like, _sick,_ now. They said I messed up my kidneys and my liver-- or, my _mom_ messed up my kidneys and my liver, a-and my _heart,_ too, and I don't want your family to be stuck dealing with that.”

Bill leans back out of the hug, only to place both hands firmly on his shoulders. “Eddie, I mean this in the nicest way possible, but shut up. My parents literally don’t care whether you’re gonna cost them a million dollars a day or _nothing._ They’ve known you since we were snot-nosed diaper-pissing preschoolers, and they were fucking _disgusted_ when I told them what your mom did. We found you in a _graveyard,_ Eddie. She… she fuh-fuh- _fucking_ _buried_ _you._ You would have _died_ if we didn’t find you when we did.”

Eddie has to _fight_ not to get all fucking emotional over the idea of Bill’s parents actually caring about him that much, his face pinching as he tries to stay composed, because there’s something a little more pressing right now than crying _more,_ which he feels he’s already done plenty of in the short time since he woke up. “How _did_ you find me?” he asks.

“Um,” says Bill, looking around at everyone else gathered around his bed. “I’m… not actually sure. I had a weird dream about, uh--” His face goes all red. “--a turtle. And then when I woke up I knew where I needed to go and what I needed to do, but I didn’t know _why_ until we were already at the graveyard.”

“We kind of talked about it while you were, well… out,” Ben offers. “We think the turtle we saw was the same one Bill saw in the deadlights, and it gave us a warning so we could save you in time.”

Eddie has… a million questions, about what the fuck business the weird universe-turtle-God thing has saving _him_ from his psycho mom, and what the fuck Ben means by “we” if it was Bill’s dream, and why any of this is even happening to him (why does _any_ of the shit he’s put up with in this life happen to him?), but he’s too tired and overwhelmed for any of it right now, so he just chokes out a feeble, “Thank you,” and goes right back to hiding in Richie’s embrace.

He falls asleep listening to the quiet chatter of his friends over the irregular beating of his heart on the monitor.

  
  
  


Eddie wakes up In Georgie’s old room, which still feels weird even after a couple months. Almost intrusive, no matter how many times Sharon Denbrough assures him that he’s always been like a son to her, anyway, and it’s nice to have him around, and it’s _nice_ to have the room occupied again. 

He rolls over, intending to check the time on the alarm clock on the nightstand, and instead he jumps back with a strange squawking noise when he comes face-to-face with fucking _Richie,_ who is nervously bouncing his leg as he stares directly at Eddie, sprawled out in his desk chair like he just belongs there.

_“Richie what the fuck?”_ Eddie demands all in one breath, scrambling to disentangle himself from the blankets and sit up. 

Richie looks half a second from passing out, and Eddie’s indignance at being creeped on while he’s sleeping is quickly replaced by healthy concern. “Richie? Are you--?”

“I’ve had a crush on you since we were kids!” Richie blurts out, then claps both hands over his mouth, eyes impossibly wide behind his glasses. 

Eddie stares, reeling from the combined effects of interrupted sleep, shock, and confusion. “Oh,” he says after a while. “Okay.”

“I don’t know why I never told you before, but then you almost _died,_ and I realized, I-- God, I dunno, what if I never got a chance to tell you? What if I just had to carry that around for the rest of my life knowing _you’d_ never know, and that _I’d_ never know what could’ve happened if I wasn’t such a pussy, and if I just fucking _told_ you, so I’m telling you. Now. That I _really_ like you. Like, I think I _love_ you. Not to be weird about it. But I really, really like you, and I want you to know before something happens to one of us and I never get a chance to tell you. I am just now realizing how creepy this actually is, uh…”

_“Richie,”_ Eddie says firmly, putting a hand up to stop him, and Richie does, a little breathless from his tangent. He’s not nearly awake or functional enough for this, and he needs to spend a long while rubbing sleep out of his eyes and a headache out of his temples before he can form a proper response. “What the fuck time is it?” he asks, first, because that seems important for some reason.

“Uhh… early,” says Richie, sheepishly.

“How’d you get in here?”

“Mrs. D let me in. She made coffee, by the way.”

“Okay.” Eddie nods, secure in the belief that he’s got a good enough handle on his emotions, now, that he won’t start flipping out when he asks Richie, “Can you say all that again, but slowly?”

Richie sucks in a deep breath, nodding, and screws his eyes shut. “I, Richie Tozier, have been head-over-heels, carve-our-initials-everywhere, _stupid_ in love with you for, like, almost a decade. I mean, to be fair, it definitely started as a kiddie crush, but I don’t think I’ll ever be able to shake it, so I think it stopped counting as a crush around the time I started planning our wedding.”

Eddie huffs out a quiet laugh at that, and Richie finally opens his eyes and looks at him again, a smile creeping across his face.

“And I just want to let you know that _now,_ because I realized that if I don’t do it as soon as possible, I might not get a chance. And I might miss out on… I dunno. Maybe I’ll miss out on the kind of things I _want_ to do with you, if I don’t tell you how I feel before shit goes wrong again. Maybe I’ll miss out on them, anyway, but it’s worth a shot, right?”

It’s definitely too early for this shit, but Eddie feels his exhaustion wash away to be replaced with a too-warm, melting sensation inside his chest and then all through his body. “This isn’t a dream?”

Richie pinches him hard on the arm.

“Ow! Fucker!” Eddie pinches him back, harder.

“I promise this isn’t a nightmare.”

Eddie can’t help smiling at that one. “Oh, this is _definitely_ not a nightmare. Why the fuck didn’t you tell me sooner? I’ve wanted to kiss you for, like, _years.”_ Eddie stops. Realization dawns on him abruptly and wonderfully. He lunges forward, grabbing Richie by the collar of his shirt (morning breath be damned), and slams their lips together. It _hurts,_ for a second, a little too forceful, but that doesn’t deter either of them. Richie’s hand finds its way to the back of his head and his fingers curl into the messy hair there, and that’s when Eddie decides to cut this out until he can brush his teeth, because he _literally just woke up._

“I thought if I told you we’d get murdered, honestly. Have you _seen_ the graffiti in Bassey Park?” Richie explains as soon as Eddie pushes him back. “But then you almost got murdered _anyway,_ so I figured it’s probably worth the risk.”

“It would’ve been worth the risk regardless, Richie. You really think we can’t handle a couple of homophobes? We survived the clown bullshit. We can survive a few assholes who think we care about their opinion.”

“Who are you and what have you done with my Spaghetti Man?” Richie demands, grinning playfully as he brings his hands up to cup Eddie’s cheeks. He presses an enthusiastic kiss to his forehead. 

“We leave for college in, like, a _month,_ Richie. It’ll be fine.”

“Attempted murder really changes a man, huh?” Richie says, and Eddie gives him a _look._ “Yeah, okay. Too soon. I hear you.” As if the fact that Eddie can barely set foot in the clubhouse without having a panic attack hadn’t already made that abundantly clear. 

“Despite what an absolute dipshit you are, I _would_ really like to go on some proper dates with you, since I’ve been dreaming about that since I was twelve fucking years old.”

“Aw, that’s the most romantic thing you’ve ever said to me. Do it again, but meaner.”

“We’re on a three-strike policy starting right now.”

Richie presses another kiss to his forehead, and this time he blows a raspberry before springing back out of Eddie’s reach, laughing. 

_“Two.”_

“I’ll take you on a date _right now._ I’ll make you swoon, I promise. I’ll show you where I carved our initials on the Kissing Bridge and everything.”

Eddie pretends to consider it for a moment, tapping his chin thoughtfully. “Only if I can show you _my_ Kissing Bridge carving,” he decides, watching Richie’s eyes bug out as his jaw pops open, and he really hopes he gets to witness the ridiculous expression all over again when Richie sees the little _“R”_ in a crudely-engraved heart he left on the wooden railing years and years ago. Sometimes he stops by to touch it up when it begins to look faded. Only when no one else is around to see, because Richie’s right -- he doesn’t want to get murdered. Which is why it only says _“R”_ instead of _“Richie.”_

“Okay,” Richie says, nodding so fast his glasses start to slip down his nose. “Yeah. Yeah, okay. We can go there and then I’ll take you to get breakfast. I’ll pay.” He’s already passing Eddie his bottles of pills and his glass of water before he has to ask. _Real_ medicine. Not fake bullshit anymore. Not after his mom completely fucked him over and ruined half his fucking organs when she tried to _literally kill him,_ before being locked up in Juniper Hill with the likes of Henry Bowers. It’s almost laughable.

Almost.

He insists on getting ready on his own, while Richie waits in the kitchen for him, and when he finally makes it downstairs, Bill is awake, too, nursing a cup of coffee while Richie talks his ear off. Mrs. Denbrough is engrossed in the morning paper’s crossword, oblivious to her son’s plight. 

“Ah, my Spaghetti!” Richie exclaims in a grossly inaccurate Italian accent, as he springs up from his spot at the island when Eddie walks into the room. “Well, I gotta dip, Big Bill, but I promise I’ll have him home by eight.”

“Literally do whatever. I don’t care,” Bill tells him, smirking into his mug. To Eddie, he says, “Did you take your pills?” and Eddie has to stop himself from rolling his eyes at Bill’s uncharacteristic _nonstop fucking worrying._

“No, Bill. I’ve only been doing exactly this my whole life. Why would I remember to take my medicine?”

“William, he’s plenty capable,” his mom says without looking up from her crossword. “He can handle himself.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Denbrough,” Eddie says, sticking his tongue out at Bill, who returns the gesture with spirit. “Richie and I are going out for breakfast. I’ll be home soon, I promise.”

Finally, she puts the pen down and brushes her hair away from her face. “Nonsense. It’s beautiful out today. Enjoy it while it lasts.”

“Okay,” Eddie says after a brief hesitation, accepting the hug she draws him into. He almost feels like he gets _too much_ freedom living here, but when he tried to explain that to Bill, he just looked at him like he’d gone nutty, and told him, _“No, that’s just how you’re supposed to be allowed to live your life,”_ and all the other losers had backed him up.

So maybe Eddie's the crazy one, here. Maybe it's genetic.

Richie’s kissing him again the second they’re out of sight in the foyer, one hand resting over the raised spot on his chest where he had his pacemaker implanted (Richie keeps making fun of him for being an old man, and telling Stan his position has been usurped). “I’m so mad that I could have done that _years_ ago,” Richie admits in a whisper as he draws back for air. “What a waste.”

“Yeah, well,” Eddie places his own hand over Richie’s where it still rests over his heart and the device that forces it to beat properly, “make the most of the time you _do_ have, okay?”

“That’s the goal, Mistah K,” Richie says softly, and Eddie has to kiss him one more time before dragging him out the front door and into the light of early morning. 

* * *


End file.
